Word: self-taught
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Kubrick is a self-taught man with an autodidact's passion for facts and the process of gathering them. Son of a Bronx physician, he was an indifferent high school student. He experimented endlessly with cameras and at 17 was hired by Look as a staff photographer. He learned something about people and a lot about photography, traveling the country shooting pictures for 4% years. At 21, he made his first short subject, three years later his first fictional feature-very low budget. He also audited Columbia University courses conducted by the likes of Lionel Trilling and Mark...
Schliemann was the self-taught amateur archaeologist who a century ago used clues in The Iliad to discover and excavate Priam's Troy. He was a truly astonishing man, a German who grubbed away his early youth as an impoverished clerk, then by his middle 20s made a fortune in Russia selling tea, olive oil and indigo. Schliemann traveled to California in 1850, when he was 28, and made another fortune provisioning gold miners. He returned to Russia and accumulated still an other pot of money, and finally retired at 41 with an ambition that seemed to have blown...
...John Holecek) describes the ease with which he mastered basic bomb making, sketching the structure of his bomb in a childlike doodle of two circles and a dot: "You explode the outer ring of TNT which squeezes the tamper which compresses the plutonium core, and boom." Could a similarly self-taught terrorist steal (or, as the experts on the program delicately put it, "divert") the needed plutonium...
...business manager, Rogers pays his clients' bills, invests their money and handles their taxes. He is a specialist in tax shelters and, although self-taught in that field, now lectures on the subject at California C.P.A. seminars. Says Rogers: "I always tell my clients up front nothing is perfect. I'm human; I make mistakes." One recent slip-up was the loss of "less than $100,000" in an Oklahoma oil well that wasn...
Historical Fumes. Martin Butlin, keeper of the British Collection at the Tate Gallery, points out in the catalogue that Turner's cataclysms were meant to replace the older European tradition of personified myth-wrathful Zeus and so forth-and thus they moralize nature itself. Turner, a self-taught man, was no classical scholar, and he made blunders of erudition about myth and history. Yet as Butlin puts it, "Turner's moral philosophy was a matter of passion and visual expression, not of strict archaeology and attention to sources . . . The fumes of history filled his brain...